Before Abraham Lincoln became the 16th president of the United States, long before the Gettysburg Address or the Emancipation Proclamation, he was a relatively unknown lawyer from Illinois. That changed on February 27, 1860, when he delivered the Cooper Union Address in New York City. In a nation bitterly divided on slavery, Lincoln stood before a skeptical audience and built a meticulous case that the Founding Fathers never intended slavery to spread into new territories.
At a time when many claimed the Constitution protected slavery and that the Declaration of Independence applied only to white men, Lincoln used the Founders’ own words and voting records to prove otherwise. He argued that Jefferson’s declaration that “all men are created equal” was written with deliberate universality, meant for generations to come. Newspapers across the North praised the address, and within months Lincoln secured the Republican nomination. Without Cooper Union, history might have chosen a different president of the United States during the Civil War.
The CEO of Bold Gold Media group, Vince Benedetto, revisits this overlooked moment, unpacking how Lincoln’s Cooper Union speech became the foundation of his rise and why it remains one of the most important Abraham Lincoln speeches ever delivered.
